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Biosemiotics

Biosemiotics is the study of sign processes in living systems — the claim that meaning-making, interpretation, and communication are not confined to human language but run through life as such, from the signalling of cells to the perceptual worlds of animals. Its founding wager is that semiosis and life are coextensive: to be alive is to interpret, to take something as a sign of something else. On this view biology is, at bottom, a science of meaning, and the line between the living and the merely physical is the line at which signs begin.

The field draws its two main resources from outside biology proper. From Charles Peirce it takes a model of the sign — triadic, and needing no human in it — general enough to hold wherever one thing stands for another. From Jakob von Uexküll it takes the Umwelt, the species-specific world an organism builds from what carries meaning for it. Thomas Sebeok joined the two — reviving Uexküll, anchoring the field on Peirce rather than Saussure — and gave the modern discipline its name. The fuller account of the sign-theory it builds on is on the semiotics subject.

The Copenhagen–Tartu school

From the 1980s the field’s centre of gravity was the Copenhagen–Tartu school. In Copenhagen, the biochemist Jesper Hoffmeyer, with Claus Emmeche, built Sebeok’s programme into a developed theory and supplied much of its vocabulary; in Tartu, Kalevi Kull carried the legacy of Juri Lotman’s semiotics of culture into the study of living systems. Its working concepts have become the field’s common currency:

Code-duality (Hoffmeyer and Emmeche): life runs on two interlocking codes — a digital one (the reproducible genetic record) and an analog one (the organism itself in its behaviour) — translated into each other across the generations.
Semiotic freedom (Hoffmeyer): the depth of meaning a system can produce and interpret, held to increase over evolutionary time.
Semiotic scaffolding (Hoffmeyer): the networks of cues and regularities by which living systems steady and guide their activity.
The semiosphere (Lotman, drawn from the semiotics of culture): the sphere of sign-processes enveloping the biosphere, the medium within which any particular semiosis becomes possible.

The field acquired its institutions in these decades: the annual Gatherings in Biosemiotics (from 2001), the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies (2005), the Springer journal Biosemiotics (2008), and the semiotics department at the University of Tartu.

The levels of semiosis

Sebeok ordered the field by where in life the sign-process sits. Endosemiotics, or the vegetative level, covers sign-processes within the body and below the cell’s surface — genetic translation, hormonal signalling, immune recognition, bacterial quorum sensing. Zoosemiotics covers the sign-behaviour of animals with nervous systems — the perceptual and communicative worlds Uexküll mapped. Anthroposemiotics covers the human, where language adds a further layer over the older sign-capacities rather than replacing them. The ordering carries the field’s central claim in miniature: the human sits at the top of a tower whose foundations run down to the single cell.

The divided field

Biosemiotics is not one settled programme. Its main internal split is over what a biological “sign” really is. The mainstream, Peircean camp treats semiosis as genuine interpretation — triadic, involving an interpretant, irreducible to mechanism. Against it, the biologist Marcello Barbieri — himself a founder and the first editor-in-chief of the field’s journal — argues for a code biology: the organic codes, the genetic code first among them, are real, objective, and mechanical, and the study of life’s codes needs no Peircean interpretation or subjectivity. Meaning, on his account, results from mechanical decoding, not from interpretation. The two camps read the same phenomena — the cell’s signalling, the genome’s translation — as, respectively, interpretation and mechanism.

A second dispute runs over how far down semiosis goes. Hoffmeyer’s “from the cell upward” makes the living cell the minimal unit, with semiosis and life coextensive. The philosopher John Deely pushed further, to a physiosemiosis in which sign-relations operate below life, in the physical world as such — a position most biosemioticians reject as stretching the sign past any useful limit. Where semiosis begins is the field’s unsettled floor.

Where biosemiotics stops

The field’s reach is its standing vulnerability. Mainstream biology has largely kept its distance, and the recurring charge is over-extension: that calling molecular signalling “interpretation” reads meaning and intention into processes that physics and chemistry already explain, and that a biology of signs redescribes what it cannot add to. Biosemiotics answers that the sign-relation is exactly what a purely mechanical description leaves out — but the answer is contested, and the field has not won the mainstream over. Its frontier, on its own dominant account, is life: above the cell it claims the whole living world; below it, in non-living matter, it makes no agreed claim, and whether the sign has any pre-biotic floor remains open.

Persons

Peirce · von Uexküll · Sebeok · Hoffmeyer